Taking Lives

by Michael Pye

  “I couldn’t call. You said your phone didn’t work up here.”

  I hadn’t the slightest idea what to say or what to do about her, she could see that. She’d have to teach me all over again.

  “I like the train,” Anna said. “I got a very slow train. It stopped at every station and several farms. Then I got a taxi up here. Everybody seems to know Formentina.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “I was glad. I mean, it might have been some tiny village nobody knew about—”

  Hart ran up the steps to his neat white house and slammed the door hard. I know now the only thing that kept me alive through that day was the arrival of Anna, “that woman in a long cotton skirt,” as Hart said, “with her long English face.”

  Anna stirred a bit on the bed. I was up, and we’d slept only a half-hour.

  “I have to collect someone from the hospital,” I said.

  “Who? I don’t understand.”

  “Someone from the village.”

  I got out before she could ask questions, left her on thin cotton sheets in a room that never stopped being warm, even with the shutters and windows closed tight.

  I drove very cautiously, but once or twice I misjudged a bend.

  The hospital corridors smelled of ether and pine and plain, denatured food. I found Zulmira and Isabel sitting like guards on either side of a door.

  “He had the operation?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Isabel said. “They won’t exactly tell us how it was.”

  “But he’s O.K.?”

  “We think so.”

  Zulmira said, “There’ll be nobody to light the chapel.”

  “We’re going home,” Isabel said.

  “But he’ll wake up alone in there.”

  “There’ll be nurses. There are two other men in there.”

  “He’ll be alone. I always sleep here.”

  “You’ll feel better if you go home and sleep.”

  “I suppose your husband wants you back.”

  “I expect he wants his supper, yes,” Isabel said.

  “He could drive us home.”

  “He has to go straight home from work.”

  “We shouldn’t have to ask Senhor João. Jorge ought to drive us. I’ve stayed here before.”

  I knew my father’s country well enough to know that conversations like this never happened in public. The one time I dropped wine-glasses on a stone floor and cursed and bellowed, I heard shutters closing on the houses all around me to spare me embarrassment. Either I now counted as a kind of local, or Zulmira was far too tired for shame.

  “I’ll try to find a doctor,” I said.

  I worked my way down the corridor. It was as tough as swimming in weeds. There were nurses, equipment, relations, a family party standing about in shock and not noticing other people trying to get by, two old men opening a five-liter white bottle of red wine and being told to put it away, a couple of doctors whose suits and coats seemed to stand away from their bodies like armor. I tackled them, got referred on, found a nurse who knew the records and told me it was a straightforward biopsy, the main danger the anesthetic, and he was well through that.

  “It was a bit late, though,” she said. “He can’t go home until tomorrow.”

  “Should his family stay?”

  “He’s fine. He’s not a young man, but he’s a strong man. Take them home and bring them back tomorrow when he can recognize them, and they can take him home.” She thought for a moment, and said, “If you could get his wife to see the doctor—” She smiled at me. “They think it’s only the men who die. Country people.”

  I didn’t understand.

  I cajoled Zulmira to her feet. I talked a nurse into opening the door so Zulmira could see Arturo’s chest rising and falling reliably in the middle bed.

  In the car on the way home Zulmira said, “I’ll make broa . They won’t have broa there. It’s all bread, white bread.”

  “You make broa,” I said. “They killed a pig today.”

  “But Arturo wasn’t there,” Zulmira said.

  At nine that evening, Zulmira put a loaf on my doorstep. Anna heard something move outside, went to the door, and saw her briskly walking away.

  “Your neighbors must like you,” she said.

  You know what I was thinking? That I would be in time, that this time I could keep a man alive, that Arturo would be together with Zulmira again. No funerals, no burials, no graves. This time, I would do better.

  Maria asked Hart to come and look at her house the day she found it. She told herself she needed another pair of eyes.

  It wasn’t in the country, she couldn’t quite manage that. Instead, it was on the outskirts of Vila Nova, on the edge of what they call the industrial zone, down the road from a lumberyard and a couple of warehouses for electrical appliances. The house itself was bright white, with a lawn and roses, and dark wood.

  Hart said, “It’s fine.”

  “I didn’t know if it was sound or not.”

  “I don’t know about those things.”

  She wanted someone to tell her that she’d judged right: that she could be comfortable here, that people would come to the house. All her life, she’d lived where it seemed natural to live—student houses, home mostly—and she had never made a choice she’d had to live with.

  She showed him the kitchen. “Big,” he said. And the other rooms, bare tile floors, dust and paint smells everywhere, odd bits of tarpaulin still lying around, a crack in a corner that snaked through the plaster from ceiling to floor and looked as though it would open onto a cliff of dirt. “I like it,” Hart said.

  “I still have to buy furniture,” she said.

  That wasn’t the point; she knew it, he knew it. He paced about and opened windows as though he wanted to know what kind of view there was. It was the usual kind: the side of the mountain, flashes of wall, tree, roof until the point where you couldn’t see higher without lying on the floor.

  They waited for each other.

  She showed him the kitchen: marble everywhere, a wide stove, dark wood cabinets. She tried the taps at the sink and he came up behind her, brushed against her, and stood back. She was waiting for the water to run hot, which was absurd since there was no gas bottle for the heater. The water ran. She turned off the taps.

  “Hey,” he said.

  She was going to say something about the garden, but he was standing against her back.

  She turned around. He was staring, it seemed, eyes soft and fixed.

  She wasn’t sure these were the right rules for domestic passion. Perhaps she should cook. She wanted to try out everything.

  She stared at the wood and marble around her.

  He kissed her left breast. She was aware of the smell of cleaning stuff: a kind of pine cracked in a chemical plant somewhere.

  “It’s fine,” he said.

  “I have to get home,” she said. She realized she meant her mother’s house.

  That weekend was the festa in Vila Nova de Formentina. Anna, of course, wanted to dance. We both thought a crowd would somehow fill the gap between us.

  The church tower was lined in white lightbulbs, so it looked like a drawing in soft, bright pencil. Huge speakers saturated the walls with sound. Green bars of neon, ropes of light and bunting glittered in the little wind among the tired brown linden leaves.

  I heard tunes I remembered from Italy, when Anna and I were first there: persistent, sentimental tunes like “Una Lagrima sul Viso . . .”

  The kids lined up: boys in T-shirts like stiff white skins, girls in flounces of skirt. The band assembled: drums, synthesizer, guitars, and a saxophone star.

  Maria Mattoso brought Hart down the mountain, and they danced together. Anna also wanted to dance, but first she wanted water from the bar. I pushed through the crowd to collect it.

  A man in a uniform shirt and uniform trousers, with a gun, tapped me on the shoulder at the bar. He was in his sixties, perhaps, with a square, dark head and a neatly ke
pt body.

  “Captain Mello asked to see you,” he said. I couldn’t make out his own name; he muttered it. “I’m at your disposal.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Captain Mello wanted me to explain about your father.”

  The music was loud, slippery stuff, old wailing tunes and a steady beat behind it; between Anna and me, the square began to roll and shift with dancing.

  “But I’m here with my wife.”

  The man shrugged his enormous shoulders.

  I climbed into his car. “I never knew about my father,” I said. “He never talked about Portugal much. He talked about history, about the Templars and the Moors and all that. He just never talked about his own history.”

  “Difficult times,” said the cop, who concentrated on driving.

  “He left in 1953,” I said. “During the dictatorship.”

  “The governor,” the cop said. “He liked to be called O Governante.”

  “I always wondered what made my father leave.” I picked at that sore without even meaning to.

  “Listen,” said the cop. “People left. That’s how the economy worked. We built the roads in France and the houses in Switzerland and the sewers in Germany. We sent money home. That’s how it was.”

  “I understand that.”

  “Then why do you want so many answers?”

  “Someone defaced my father’s grave. I wanted to know why.”

  “You sure you want to know?”

  He had passed through Vila Nova to the outskirts, where tired buildings lined the road, white walls were streaked black with mold. He stopped the car outside one of them, a long block like a barracks with bars at the windows. There was no glass left in the windows, I could see.

  “What is this?” I asked.

  “Captain Mello asked me to show you something. He said it would be easier during the festa—nobody here. Then he wondered if you would come for a drink.”

  “I thought this was official business—”

  “Listen,” said the cop. “You wanted answers. Mello wants you to get them. Come on.”

  The door was padlocked shut until the cop opened it.

  I was entering a dark, empty building with an armed cop whose name I did not know, but who said he was from Mello. I thought this very clearly as I stood at the start of a dim corridor. But some threshold had changed in me over the past weeks. This was not melodrama. It was the only way in which a mystery like my father could possibly be resolved.

  The cop bustled down the corridor. There were broken doors into small rooms on either side.

  “We’re going down,” he said. “It doesn’t always smell good.”

  There was a wide, almost ornamental staircase in the middle of this functional heap of a building: azulejos of cherubim and Justice, of country scenes and dizzy-looking sheep and an ominous, radiant eye. The lights were so dim I caught only fragments of shining images on the tiles.

  We started down the stairs.

  Out of the basement came a smell of rotted meat, damp, something like lichen growing on the damp. It didn’t smell empty, though.

  The cop snapped on a light in a square, whitewashed room. The light was so much brighter than the rest that I thought for a moment the room was immaculate. Then I realized the floor was broken concrete, the walls cracked from each other at the corners, and there were the prints of rat paws on the walls, like handprints of a child.

  “Mello said you should see this,” the cop said. “I’m to tell you what I saw here.”

  “This was a police barracks?” I said. “Some sort of police place?”

  “PVDE,” the cop said. “Polícia de Vigilância e de Defesa do Estado. Then it was PIDE after the German war: Policia Internacional e de Defesa do Estado.”

  “Defense of the State,” I said.

  “I don’t know English,” the cop said. “Well, I don’t like this any more than you do, you know. I don’t want to be back here.”

  He stood in the center of the room.

  “Hooks,” he said. “Up there. This pillar”—he pointed to a tree trunk—“was always here. You could tie a man up neatly. Arms behind, always. Rope around the knees. Then the arms could go up behind the neck.

  “The electricity,” he said, “was over there. Several outlets. They had their own generator.”

  “I see.”

  “They had other techniques, of course. They had what they called the ‘camp of slow death’ in the colonies. They could keep you in jail forever, just in case. But it all came down to the threat of this room. This kind of room. This is just the local version, the subsidiary room.”

  “For torture,” I said.

  “Of course.”

  “My father was here?”

  But the cop was patrolling the walls now, as though he wanted to stay as far away as he could from the responsibility at the center of an otherwise blank room: the outlets, the pillar, the hooks.

  “They used to like asking why the prisoner didn’t defend himself,” he said. “They thought that meant he wasn’t any kind of a man, and they said so.” His voice dropped. “This wasn’t even the worst. They had hutches, too: dark, damp. You didn’t get fed often. You stayed there, cramped up and shitting yourself, week in, week out.”

  I said, “I suppose—”

  “You didn’t want to know all this, did you? It’s a bit of inglorious history. Well, you asked. You’re being told.”

  “Was my father here?”

  “Yes,” said the cop. He spat.

  “He was a prisoner?”

  The cop said, “No.”

  I brought myself to say this with great difficulty, trying to get the words past a protective guard of memories of all my father’s kindness and gentleness and propriety. I said, “He was a policeman?”

  “No, no, no. You don’t get it, do you?”

  “You don’t explain.”

  “Listen. It was better before the world war. The PVDE and the PIDE and all the rest of them, half the time they didn’t know what they were doing. They’d forget to take people’s pictures. They weren’t good at taking fingerprints or keeping files straight. Amateur night. Then they had more contact with the experts—German experts from the Gestapo, mostly—and they got better. They learned to hurt people seriously. They started using sound torture instead of just whips and sticks and water.”

  The blankness of the room was suddenly appalling, like a void in what I understood of the world. Worse, I could not quite imagine what had happened there. We’ve softened the stuff of brutality into sadomasochistic chic, a jokey whipping on a music video; so we can’t catch the desperation that salted the real pain. I can’t, anyway.

  “You’ve seen enough?” the cop said.

  “Yes,” I said. I wanted to be able to imagine and sympathize with those who had suffered there—those who must be right, because their righteousness was defined by bruises, scars, and even death, who fit the criteria for proper martyrs. I couldn’t. I’d been too comfortable.

  The lights went off and the darkness seemed to fill up the empty room. We were almost running by the end of the upstairs corridor. I could smell old dirt on my shoes.

  “Mello’s expecting you, now,” the cop said.

  In the middle of the dancing, Anna stood about puzzled. I should have come back. I should have brought bottles of water. I should be out on the square now, turning with her in that same tight box step the older people performed with such startling energy.

  The night was down completely. The light had a kind of glamour against black sky and the thin sickle of the moon. The square was parceled out between the generations, between widows and hopefuls, and people were flooding in from the side streets, laughing and shouting, everyone out in the night. Children danced between the taller bodies, in their own low world.

  She saw all this, saw backs of half-familiar heads, thought she knew Arturo from the village but could never quite reach him through the crowd. She stood about the bar, where the men jos
tled amiably for beer and wine.

  She came up against Hart’s back as he stood talking to Maria.

  “Where’s John?” she asked. “Where is he?”

  Hart said, “He’s with you, isn’t he?”

  “I haven’t seen him for a half-hour. He went to the bar and he never came back.”

  Maria said, “I expect he’s talking.” She says she had no high expectation of men’s manners on party nights. But she agrees that Anna was alarmed.

  “He’s got away from both of us,” Hart said. Anna looked furious at this assumed complicity, but she didn’t argue.

  Hart broke out across the square, being tall enough and broad enough to divide the crowd and see past them. Anna went back to the bar and tried to ask people, in a kind of proto-Romance she based on half-remembered Italian, if they’d seen me.

  Maria says Anna couldn’t find the words to describe me; so Maria tried to help.

  Mello’s house lay at the end of a straight, narrow driveway that must once have been the road to a farmhouse, but now was hemmed in with boxes of apartments on both sides. It was a villa, with neat, low-growing flowers. Doors at the side of the house opened directly into a cluttered living room: papers, low lights, walls of colonial souvenirs.

  “Good evening,” Senhora Mello said. She was a rather distinguished woman, but she spoke in the manner of a tape, as though she had memorized just two words of English and everything about them: “Good eve, en, ing.”

  Mello sent her away. I meant to be shocked by the abruptness of his manners. Instead, I was glad to be getting on with things.

  He led me into a study, and brought out a decanter. The room smelled deeply of cedar oil, almost enough to save me from the dirt and body smells of the barracks.

  “I’m very sorry,” he said.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “They have painted the date on your father’s grave again. I don’t know why people are so unwilling to forget—”

  The wine was too sweet and the cold did not save it.

  “It could be anybody,” he said. “Children. Toxicodependents. Perhaps they use the graveyard to take drugs.”

  “But they keep painting the same date.”

  There was a brief silence.

  “Your father’s tomb is different,” Mello said. “It is visible.” He sipped his wine rather carefully, as though he found it slightly distasteful. “These days, people don’t accept that kind of difference. They don’t respect it.”